Do Subtitles Really Help Learning? Captioning In The Classroom

Video Transcript

Do Subtitles Help Learning? (Using Captioning in the Classroom) 

Here's where we start to learn that students aren't always the best judge of what's helping them learn. They're really good at knowing what feels good and what they like, but that's not always synonymous with deep learning. So as teachers, although it might not be comfortable all the time, we have to be willing to press those hard buttons and say, "Look, I know you might not like this as much, but trust me, this is going to lead to deeper learning. It's not going to feel as comfortable, but this is where depth comes." 

Introduction and Research Overview 

Hello everybody, and welcome to this week's "From Theory to Practice," where I take a look at the research so you don't have to. The article I've selected this week is called "Effect of Onscreen Text on Multimedia Learning with Native and Foreign Accented Narration" by Chan and colleagues. 

To understand what they did with this paper, there are two longstanding principles of multimedia learning we have to understand. 

The Redundancy Effect 

The first principle is called the redundancy effect. Put simply, the redundancy effect says that when narration is combined with identical onscreen captioning, learning and understanding drops. The reason for this concerns how the brain processes reading and listening. 

When you're listening to a narrator, a very specific auditory linguistic area of the brain is used to process that voice. Interestingly, this exact same network is used to process silent reading. So just like you can't understand two people speaking to you at the same time, neither can you understand a narrator while trying to read simultaneously. There's just not enough room in the brain to handle this. 

The Voice Effect 

The second principle we have to understand is called the voice effect. This says that when the narrator has a foreign accent different from the viewer/listener, learning and understanding drops. The reason for this has to do with decoding.

Typically, when listening to a foreign accent, a lot of cognitive energy is expended just trying to make sure you got the right words so you can basically follow the argument. Unfortunately, when all this energy is expended just on decoding the words, deeper understanding and conceptualization suffer. 

The Research Study 

What did this paper do? These authors said, "What would happen to learning and understanding if we pit the redundancy effect against the voice effect? When these two come together, what happens?" 

Here's what they did: They had different groups of people watch a video lesson on the formation of lightning, and at the end of the video, they had to answer two different sets of questions. 

One set we'll call surface retention questions. These were just basic facts that they heard from the video—things like "How hot does lightning get?" 

The other questions are called deep retention questions. These are questions that don't directly mirror things learned in the video, but if you truly understood the concept, you should be able to answer them. For instance, "Which of these clouds is more likely to produce lightning?" 

Part One: Native Accent Results 

In the first part of this experiment, they had three different groups of people watch this video when the narrator had the same accent they did. The three different groups were: 

• Group one: just had the narrator 
• Group two: had some keywords peppered in 
• Group three: had full simultaneous captioning 

What happens as far as surface retention is concerned? All three groups performed significantly the same—everyone got the same basic facts from it. 

But once you move into deep retention, that pure narration group (the one with no text) was almost two times more likely to answer deep questions than either of the groups that had text. So boom! We just demonstrated the redundancy effect: add text and learning starts to go down. 

Part Two: Foreign Accent Results 

In part two of this study, these researchers had three different groups watch the same video, except this time the narrator had a foreign accent. In this case, they were using an Asian accent that was not native to the listeners. Same thing: we got three groups—pure narration, keywords, and full captioning. 

What happens here? It turns out that with a foreign narrator with no text or only keywords, surface retention drops significantly. But as soon as you add captioning (full narration), surface retention rises to the same level as the people listening to a native-accented speaker. 

So here we have evidence that adding captioning with a foreign narrator can actually serve to boost understanding and comprehension. But unfortunately, once you take a look at deep retention, all three foreign-accented groups performed worse. None of them performed as well as that pure narration without words from the native accent condition. 

Practical Applications 

Let's bring this back to us. What does this mean for us? If you're going to be doing multimedia lessons, don't just automatically caption your videos or embed them—make captioning an option, because our accent doesn't always match our students. When we make closed captioning a choice, those students who match our accent can keep it off and do strong learning. Those students that struggle with our accent can have this boost. 

The second thing we can draw from this is that this doesn't just matter for video learning. The same principle's going to happen in real life. So anytime we're teaching, if we've got slides with text behind us or we're giving handouts with text, we have to be very cognizant of how we're presenting information and when we're asking students to do the impossible.

The Surprising Student Perception 

There's one last bit to this research that I haven't told you about that I think is really interesting. At the end of the study, they asked all the students to rate the different conditions—when did they think they were learning best? Almost to a student, every single one of them said that when captioning was on, they were learning more. They thought that was helping them make sense of the material. They had no clue that it was hurting them. 

Here's where we start to learn that students aren't always the best judge of what's helping them learn. They're really good at knowing what feels good and what they like, but that's not always synonymous with deep learning. So as teachers, although it might not be comfortable all the time, we have to be willing to press those hard buttons and say, "Look, I know you might not like this as much, but trust me, this is going to lead to deeper learning. It's not going to feel as comfortable, but this is where depth comes." 

The more we can do that and show them the impact over time, ideally, the more we can get them on board to recognizing these different principles of learning and embedding them in their own practice. It's about taking agency over their learning. 

Conclusion 

So that's it. This is a really good paper, and I got a lot of cool ideas from it. Hope you did too. If you liked what you heard, if you can give me a thumbs up and subscribe below, that'll make sure that we can get these videos out to more people on YouTube so we can get these ideas out there. Thank you guys so much for joining me. I hope you're all well, and I'll see you guys soon. Bye, y'all!